


Tell Me the Secrets of the Sky

by IncineraryPeriphery



Series: Meet Me in the Woods Tonight [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Card Games, Child Harry Potter, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamsharing, Gen, Harry Potter is a Horcrux, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mental Link, Mild Blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2021-02-18 00:35:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21685645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncineraryPeriphery/pseuds/IncineraryPeriphery
Summary: Harry has a lot of time to dream when he isn't earning his keep for his Aunt and Uncle.Sometimes, a boy joins him.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Series: Meet Me in the Woods Tonight [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1564282
Comments: 4
Kudos: 90





	Tell Me the Secrets of the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: Syracuse, NY banned playing pinochle within city limits during WWI due to anti-German sentiment.

The telly is on.

Harry can hear it through the door of his cupboard, soft and drowned out by his cousin's laughter every few minutes. Uncle is working late and Dudley takes every opportunity he can to eat while watching whatever his friends like to brag about watching. Other than that, the house is quiet.

The giblets from dinner sit uneasily in the pit of his stomach, the smell of the roast chicken from the kitchen taunting him despite being little more than bones now. Swallowing down the hunger, Harry rolls his back toward the door. His blanket bunches up underneath him, thin and scratchy against his skin.

There isn't much to do in his cupboard. Aunt Petunia makes sure of it whenever he goes to wash up.

He has two crayons stuffed inside his pillowcase that she hasn't found yet, a broken army man Uncle Vernon stepped on hidden in an old shoe, and a carefully folded piece of paper he practices his letters on slipped into a crack in the floorboards beneath his cot. Harry also has a spider on the ceiling he's trying to make friends with, but it doesn't seem to understand him and does nothing but sit on its web whenever he checks on it. But it's too dark to practice and he doesn't dare turn on the bulb while Aunt Petunia is awake and still angry with him for spilling the gravy.

So he closes his eyes and counts his heartbeat as high as he can to try to sleep.

By the time he's done ten repeats of ten, Harry jolts awake as his Uncle comes through the door. He pulls his pillow over his head, avoiding the crayons, and screws his eyes shut at Uncle Vernon's voice. The telly goes louder and switches to the news. It's silent in the next breath.

Harry waits.

Two counts of ten come and go before he dares lift the pillow. The light's on and there's another boy settled against the foot of his cot looking boredly at the spider on the ceiling, which means Harry's finally asleep. The boy notices him, too, not that there's much else going on in the cupboard. Harry sits up, presses his back against the wall, and wraps his arms around his knees.

"You take forever to fall asleep." The boy says. It echoes weirdly against the wood, like he's speaking out the end of a long tunnel, and his face contorts into something much less human before going back to normal. Used to this particular quirk of his dream-mate, Harry nods.

"Sorry." He whispers out of habit.

The boy doesn't answer him back. Instead, he stands, dipping his head down so it doesn't bump against the stairs and pushing the cupboard door open. It swings silently on its hinges, the rest of the house bright and empty beyond it.

"Come on," he says, waiting for him on the other side of it, "let's go outside tonight." 

Harry scrambles after him. For a moment, the boy is impossibly tall and has bright red eyes that cut through his skin like the rusty pocket knife Dudley found ages ago. In the next he's taking him by the hand and leading him toward the kitchen. They sit across from each other at the table, the cheery yellow tablecloth set with breakfast dishes that disappear and reappear when Harry looks at them. The boy wrinkles his nose at him, sitting spine-straight and crossing his ankles while swinging them back and forth.

"Your dreams are always so boring." He says. Harry privately agrees but he apologizes anyway, shrinking further into his chair. The space between them is impossibly large and, yet, the boy somehow manages to nudge his shins with shiny black shoes. "Can't you think about something other than this ugly house?"

"It's better than your orphanage." Harry says quietly. The boy flickers into something with too many limbs and a solid foot connects with his leg. They both know he's right, though. The orphanage is almost as much of a cage as Privet Drive is but they can leave it and sometimes a funny old man in weird clothes shows up to lecture them. And, well, they can leave Harry's cupboard, too, but the house has always stopped them from leaving it and there are certain rooms upstairs that kick them out after a few minutes.

The boy dramatically throws himself to the floor like the ladies on Aunt Petunia's soaps do.

"I want t'go outside." He says. He melts into a puddle of black oil that almost looks like a snake and in the next moment throws his arm over his face. "I want to lie in the grass and look at the stars."

Harry kicks his leg, tucking the other one underneath him. In the other room, the telly turns on. Uncle Vernon's voice blares from it for a second before cutting off. The electric lights flash an eerie sort of green and the cheery scenery outside the windows peels from the wall like old paint. There are no stars, but it doesn't stop it from turning to night outside with the next blink.

"You know more about them than I do." Harry says. "Wake up and try again?"

"That'll take too long. I have important business tomorrow, y'know." 

He doesn't know. The boy doesn't share much with him outside of their dreams, which are always more interesting than Harry's own. They also don't change as much. The room spins under them to the sound of a motorbike before falling silent again, going back to the empty kitchen he spends too much time in outside of sleeping. The boy sits up, pulling his legs underneath him and patting the ground next to him. Pulling out a deck of cards, worn and bent around the edges, he smiles up at him.

"I bet you've never played gin before." He says. Harry nods, slipping off his chair to the offered space. He's heard of it from Dudley's bragging about watching a movie he wasn't supposed to at Piers' house, but he doubts the game would ever be allowed in Privet Drive. Card games like this are for troublemakers and hooligans, not the proper, upstanding family the Dursley's are. The tiles change their pattern into something that looks like the old drawings Aunt Petunia keeps in the attic and the red card in the boy's hands flicker into black. "I'll teach you."

Harry is not good at the game.

The cards keep changing on him and he's not too good at counting, but the boy doesn't say anything about it. Instead, he walks him through the steps and the weird words that don't come off his tongue right no matter how much he practices saying them. Harry very nearly wins after a few more rounds.

The rapping at his cupboard door wakes him more than Aunt Petunia's yelling does. It tears him away from their game on the kitchen floor, leaving the room spinning and collapsing under their feet before he's blinking away the blurriness and scrambling for his glasses.

"Up, boy." His Aunt says sharply. "Make yourself presentable and get started on breakfast."

Harry does as he's told.

But there's new things rattling around in his head and he whispers the rules to himself as he struggles a comb through his hair and washes his face. He still doesn't know the boy's name but he supposes he ought to thank him. His Aunt and Uncle have very little patience to teach him new things and he's grateful that it's hard to mess something as simple as cleaning up more than he already does. The day drags on despite his excitement to meet the boy again. He finishes his chores with an impatience that nips at his heels and nearly spills the potatoes across the tiles he'd played on last night. They don't change from the cool black-and-white linoleum and Harry doesn't dare try to wish them to, not when the consequences for it will be much more severe than ruining dinner. 

Settling into his cot and whispering a good night to the spider, he pulls the blanket over his head and tries to sleep.

The low murmur of the telly drifts through his door, playing some sort of movie with lots of people screaming, and makes it hard to hear himself think. Harry counts again and repeats the scoring rules of gin rummy into his pillowcase until his throat hurts. His Uncle stomps up the stairs to bed and it's quiet for a long while before he's able to drift off.

The wind howls to life around him.

Harry's never been here before, standing on the stoop of a house that looks like it's going to collapse if someone touches it. There's a snake nailed to the door and the hedges have grown wild around the edges of the lawn. It's night and when he cranes his head toward the sky, there's stars peeking out from behind the clouds. Beside him, the boy looks about the same age as Piers' older brother. He's pretty sure it's the same boy, at least, since Harry's never shared his dreams with anyone else before. He slips his hand into the other's as dead leaves drag over his trainers.

The boy whirls on him, a pale stick in his other hand.

"Don't scare me like that." He scolds after a moment of staring, pocketing the stick and turning back toward the house. Neither of them drop their hands and Harry shifts a little closer with an apology. The world around them feels contained, like there's nothing beyond the hedgerows despite the fact that he can see a quiet little town. He fights down the urge to fidget.

"Should we knock?" Harry asks.

The boy shakes his head, hand tightening until it hurts. He bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself from crying out. It does nothing to help him, anyway, making noise only serves to make his Uncle angrier. Tasting blood, he blinks away the blurriness of tears and steps closer.

"No." He says, not moving away from the door. Nothing flickers like they do in Harry's dreams. "There's nothing inside you'd want to see."

They wait outside for a while in silence. The boy's grip eventually loosens and he can breathe again without wanting to cry, looking back towards the sky to watch the clouds move. Harry isn't too bothered by waiting without talking or the weird smell leaking out from underneath the door. He's very good at staying quiet.

Something else leaks outside from under the door, too. It's dark like the wine Aunt Petunia likes when no one else is home and sticks to his trainers when he steps away from it. The boy starts, as if he isn't expecting it, and tugs him away from the doors and toward the town.

"Let's go somewhere else." He says. Harry follows him for a lack of anywhere else to go.

They wander past the hedges and through the streets. There's no people out but the houses are lit from the inside and the dirt crunches underneath his feet, his breath coming out in short-lived clouds. He takes it all in with a polite curiosity. Their dreams are usually in the Privet Drive house or the orphanage, not walking around outside in the cold. Wait - right.

"What's your name?" Harry asks when he can finally swallow down the fear of punishment. The older boy looks at him, steering him out the way of another puddle in the same moment. He apologizes automatically. A hand squeezes his own, much gentler than before.

"Voldemort." The boy says. They carefully dodge another puddle that drips from one of the house's windows. Harry thinks it's a rather silly-sounding name but keeps his mouth shut about it. After all, his cousin is named Dudley Dursley.

Maybe they deserve it.

Voldemort leads him past the gates of a large mansion and up its steps to the front door. All the grass on the lawn is dead and the wind roars louder around them, whipping the leaves into furious swirls and tugging his hair every which way. He can't seem to get through the door, though, his grip sliding off the knob that keeps changing shape with every try. Harry takes it, makes it steady, and pushes forward. Inside, the mansion is dusty and deserted despite the glow of old lights set into the walls. When he looks back, the door is hanging in pieces and halfway off its hinges.

"Come on." Harry says, leading them deeper into the mansion. Voldemort's fingers are tight around his own and there's a deck of cards in his pocket that wasn't there before. "We need to finish our game."

"Right." He says. His expression is distant and rather bemused, like his cousin's when Uncle Vernon talks about what he does at work. They find what Harry thinks is the kitchen, since its got a stove and an icebox and a very nice-looking countertop that his Aunt would be horribly jealous of. He settles cross-legged onto the floor and deals the cards as carefully as Voldemort did yesterday night. Across from him, the hand he'd been holding drips blood onto the very clean tile because he hasn't sat down yet. 

Harry frowns.

"You don't have to play with me if you don't want to." He says softly. Harry doesn't want to make the person he shares his dreams with upset any more than he wants to be punished for something he didn't do. "I don't mind."

Voldemort finally looks at him and the cards between them. He can feel something dripping into his hair, thick and tacky as it rolls over his skin, but it doesn't get into his eyes or splatter onto his glasses like it should. Kneeling down, he attempts to wipe some of it from Harry's cheek and only manages to smear everything everywhere. It's kind of gross, but he's also had his head in places it really shouldn't be so it's definitely not as disgusting as it could have been.

"Are you meant to punish me for my ambitions?" Voldemort asks, searching his face like it holds the answers he wants. He doesn't really know what he's looking for. Neither of them move for a breathless moment. 

Voldemort laughs.

It's soft and far too close to his face, but the worst part is that Harry _recognizes_ it. The room around them flashes a sickly green and melts into the kitchen of Privet Drive before swirling back into the front steps of the house from earlier. There's blood drying on his face, his hand tight in Voldemort's grasp and the pale stick held tightly in the other. The wind howls.

The other's face contorts into something ugly and menacing, and he makes a grab for Harry's throat.

He wakes up a second later, sweaty and shaking in his cot with the blanket tangled tight around his legs. The light seeping in through the crack under his door tells him that it's way too early in the morning. When he reaches up to touch his neck where Voldemort tried to choke him, it hurts.

Harry doesn't go back to sleep.


End file.
